“Snow White and the Huntsman” took a big bite out of the weekend’s box office action, opening with a strong $56.2 million, despite a mixed critical reception. “Men in Black 3” finished second with “The Avengers” rounding out the top three in a weekend that saw receipts drop by a little more than 7 percent over the weekend previous.

In the pages of the Sunday New York Times, writer/director Alex Cox reflects on his love of the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s. Filmmakers (including Cox) have tried to reproduce the vibe of the Italian-produced westerns, but no one’s ever really come close.

Here’s the nut graf:

“And thus it was that this young filmgoer, in the late ’60s, discovered not the Summer of Love but the Summer of Spaghetti. On a high school trip to Paris I encountered that city’s network of second- and third-run movie theaters, which played the most obscure Italian westerns any enthusiast could wish for, dubbed in French.

In Paris again the next summer I got a job as an office boy at Les Films Marbeuf. This didn’t provide much valuable work experience, but I didn’t care. Marbeuf distributed the most legendary of these B westerns, Sergio Corbucci’s “Django.” It is to this great, mad, violent spaghetti western — and its many sequels — that Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming film, “Django Unchained,” alludes. In the Corbucci film Django (played by a young Franco Nero) arrives in a muddy shantytown on foot, dragging a coffin. In the coffin is a machine gun with which he will shortly kill many enemies. Why does he do this? Apparently they are racist Southerners who wear red hoods rather than white ones. In a brief scene Django visits his wife’s grave and reflects that she was murdered by the leader of the bad guys, Major Jackson. Why the major killed her, and why Django has waited so many years to take revenge, is entirely unclear. And, equally, unimportant.

My enthusiasm for “Django” and its contemporaries rivaled that of a young Elizabethan treated to the London theater of the Rose or the Globe. Who cared why the Dane waited so long to murder his uncle? There was mayhem! There was murder! There was madness! There was music! And a ghost! The enthusiasm for these things shown by the best Renaissance playwrights — Marlowe, Webster, Kyd, Middleton — rivaled the spaghetti western auteurs’ equal passion for arbitrary killing, crucifixions, loud music and scenes with white-clad villains abused by talking parrots.”